In this article I want to focus on Decoupled Architecture. This is the start of a small series, in the end driving the idea back to Business Applications, but this first post is going to be quite agnostic.

Very often we are faced with a project where, dues to obvious constraints, like time and budget, we have to produce an output that might not be ideal on the long run. While we’re solving the problem at hand successfully, are we really setting the customer on the right path for the future?

One interesting aspect requested recently was the ability for a user to quickly see, when looking at an all record view the stage a record is at in the business process flow. That would make it easier for users to not only see quickly where their records are, but also have the ability to filter for only records at a particular stage to focus on.

This can be achieved easily, with a no code configuration. Let’s see how.

We’ve all seen the scenario, something happens in Dynamics, and a user must be notified. We’ve done it so far using emails, the brave ones have even done it with SMS by integrating with Twilio. SMS is not a protocol that confirms the receipt of the message (just FYI), and typically not under the umbrella of a Messaging Team to manage. But what if there was another way?

Welcome to Skype for Business notifications. Yes, we can send a message on Skype to a user when something of importance happens in Dynamics.

For this scenario I’m going to do a no-code approach, using Flow. We’ll discuss the challenges further down, but for now, let’s see how easy it is.Read the rest of this entry »

So, this came about in a recent discussion. When you have a Two Options field in Dynamics, what’s the point of marking it a business required field?

Let’s start by looking at how you create this field. When you add a new Two Options field, the screen to define it looks like the screenshot below:

Observe that, when you define the field properties, the values are by default Yes and No (you can actually edit and change these), but all the way to the bottom right, you are defining the default value. That means that, no matter what you do, the field will have a default value as defined here. And that works just fine, in particular, when a user creates a record. The selected default value is populated.Read the rest of this entry »